The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (55 page)

 
 
IN THE LAST decades of the Cold War, very little was heard from the surviving Americans in the Soviet Union. Among the millions of Stalin’s victims, the American emigrants scarcely registered as just one small tile in a vast mosaic of suffering. And of the thousands who had left in the early thirties, only a handful ever returned home in the footsteps of Thomas Sgovio. One of the few was Victor Herman, who managed to send a letter to a law firm in New Orleans, addressed to a cousin he had never met. After long years of bureaucratic struggle and harassment, Victor Herman finally received an American passport and was allowed to leave the USSR in 1976. Forty-five years after he had departed New York as a teenager on a passenger liner bound for Leningrad, he returned home to Detroit. He was sixty years old, and his story was featured in the pages of
The New York Times.
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In America, Victor Herman published a memoir of his experiences entitled
Coming Out of the Ice,
which received a measure of critical attention, almost as an anomaly of the Cold War, a historical curiosity. Although his family was eventually allowed to join him in Detroit, the trauma of the camps of Burelopom remained with him and left him no peace. In the early hours of the morning, Victor Herman would awake with a start from his dreams, convinced that he was still starving and desperate for a scrap of food. The following year, he launched a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company, charging that it had abandoned his family to their fate in the Soviet Union. The Ford lawyers responded that Sam Herman had never actually worked for their company, and the case was dismissed by the Federal District Court of Detroit. Seven years later, on March 25, 1985, Victor Herman died of a heart attack in his hometown, at the age of sixty-nine.
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After the advent of glasnost, a few more Americans returned to the United States in the late 1980s like Rip Van Winkles whose lives had flashed by from youth into old age. As individuals they were not welcomed with any fanfare, just shrugs, scarcely a footnote of history, a few wide-eyed old men shuffling into airports, ready to be interviewed by the FBI checking they were the same people who had left in the 1930s, not Soviet agents who had already been caught using the American emigrés’ identities. The collective existence of the American emigrants was hardly acknowledged in the short history of the young Republic. And yet their lives held a moral significance far greater than their numbers.

Abe Stolar’s father had worked for the
Moscow Daily News
before his arrest and execution in 1937. Abe Stolar was wounded serving in the Red Army during the war, and his sister was sent to the camps in 1951. After years of waiting, Stolar was finally allowed to return to America in 1989:
“I cannot find words. It has been a long time. I tried very hard to get here.”
In Chicago, he walked the streets of his youth, asking for places that had not existed for decades, his accent and speech still anchored in the 1930s. In fifty years, virtually everything had changed in Chicago; all the old landmarks were long gone. Only Wrigley Field remained standing, and the Chicago Cubs were still playing in the old baseball park. One more time, after almost sixty years, Abe Stolar was able to watch his beloved Cubs take to the field. Only baseball had remained unchanged, as though awaiting his return.

 
 
OTHER AMERICANS STAYED on in Russia. Albert “Red” Lonn also survived his sentence in Burelopom, although Victor Herman had believed he had died in the camps. On his release, Lonn returned to his wife in Karelia, after fourteen years of imprisonment. In the small town of Suojarvi, Lonn worked quietly as an electrician, and started teaching a new generation of children the rules of baseball. He could not show them the baseball signed by Babe Ruth he had brought with him from America, but he remained the captain of the “championship” winning team of 1934. And despite his every hardship, Albert Lonn stayed a baseball fanatic until the very end.

Lucy Flaxman was held as a prisoner in the camps for three years, before her rehabilitation and release in 1956, under the general amnesty. On her return to Moscow, she received four hundred rubles’ compensation for her confiscated belongings, and her son gave her enough money to buy some material to have a suit made. She then worked as a literary translator at the Soviet news agency Novosti. Until her death, Lucy Flaxman never allowed anyone to say a bad word about Nikita Khrushchev. “He gave freedom to thousands of people,” she would say. Her son remembered his mother as “always young in her soul” with never much interest in politics. She worked hard, and liked to take her granddaughter for a walk to the shops, and celebrate the holidays.
“She was a very easy-going person, and did not reflect much, which was certainly for the best in the USSR.”
In 1965, she met Aleksandr Fisson, a retired prosecutor from the Far East fleet, and the couple lived happily together in Moscow. In 1979, Lucy Flaxman died of cancer that had progressed very quickly.
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OF THE AMERICAN servicemen held captive in the Soviet Union after World War II, nothing more was known. The American intelligence files remained closed, left buried in the vaults to accumulate dust and gradually be forgotten by succeeding generations of operatives. It seemed the conscience of the world lay dormant through the Cold War, locked in the embrace of superpower antagonism. And while the Gulag camps lost the vast majority of their prisoners after 1956, the system was never completely shut down.

The state repressions continued until the very end of the Soviet regime. Through the 1960s and 1970s, political dissidents in the USSR were routinely diagnosed as suffering from “mental illness” by Soviet psychiatrists and placed in institutions to be force-fed drugs, or subjected to electroshock “therapy” until cured of their stubborn desire for freedom of speech. In the midsixties, the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky met someone in a special clinic who had been there almost a decade for demanding an inquiry into Stalin’s crimes.
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Another dissident, Andrei Sinyavsky, was arrested and put on trial in February 1966 for the “crime” of having his books published abroad. At Sinyavsky’s trial, the judge’s questions echoed the absurdity of a regime that had cut itself off from the world—
“Do you think reactionary publishers would have printed your books so beautifully if there had been nothing anti-Soviet in them? Just look at this paper, just look at this book jacket”
—before he sentenced Sinyavsky to seven years in “strict-regime” labor camps.
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Within the Soviet Union, the United States must always be portrayed as in a state of semi-permanent crisis if Friedrich Engels was to be considered justified in calling Karl Marx “the Darwin of History.” Upon this historical necessity— an idea as fragile and finely crafted as a Fabergé egg—was hung the whole justification for the Soviet’s regime’s existence, and the endless sacrifices borne by its people.
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After Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown in the coup of Communist Party hardliners in October 1964, the business of running the Soviet state was quickly returned to normal. Gone was the vain pretense of recognizing Stalin’s “mistakes.” It was far simpler instead to restore Stalin’s name to uneasy eminence in the Soviet pantheon. After the coup, Nikita Khrushchev was turned into a “non-person,” kept under house arrest by the KGB in a dacha twenty miles west of Moscow until his death in September 1971.
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During the stagnation and repression of the Brezhnev years, an end game was taking place, although few were aware of it at the time. As a young Central Committee secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev remembered overhearing an aging Leonid Brezhnev turn to ask Yuri Andropov, “How’s my speech?” to which the KGB chief answered, “Good, good, Leonid Ilyich.” Later, when Gorbachev inquired which Marxist-Leninist message Leonid Brezhnev was referring to, Andropov explained he had misunderstood: “Leonid Ilyich was having increasing trouble speaking.”

As the Soviet Union slipped away into a gerontocracy, one aging Leninist hero with a chestful of medals succeeded another in a patient shuffle to the front of the queue, their collective belief in the socialist society lost to the evidence all around them. At the end, the entire country was still queuing for food. And in 1987, two years after Gorbachev came to power, the Russian writer Leonid Borodin was still serving a prison sentence for advocating religious freedom in the USSR.
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And there, perhaps, our story might have ended, except where Russia is concerned, little is straightforward and all endings appear false. In the summer of 1989, a Hungarian prime minister whose name few people can now recall made the fateful decision to open the border and allow East Germans permission to cross freely into Austria, thereby setting off the chain of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps Miklós Németh was delivering a fraternal thank-you for the “socialist assistance” of 1956.

In the Kremlin, the final Soviet leader, the one man with sufficient power to halt the velvet revolutions of Eastern Europe, chose not to maintain the status quo through violence. Mikhail Gorbachev’s grandfathers had both been arrested during the Terror, and his wife Raisa’s grandfather was executed in 1937. Perhaps this family history might help to explain why Gorbachev was not prepared to follow the actions of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, who ruthlessly ordered in tanks to kill the Chinese students protesting for democracy in Tiananmen Square that summer. After the failure of the hardliners’ coup against him in August 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The “greatest social experiment in the history of mankind” ended on Christmas Day 1991, as the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin and the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Only then could the final act of a tragedy begin to unfold.

26

The Truth at Last

 
 
 
Visiting the United States in 1992, President Boris Yeltsin made an unexpected announcement to the news media. In the early 1950s, he said, Soviet forces had shot down an American plane and taken its dozen-member crew hostage. Although the Russian officials accompanying their erratic new president made efforts to backtrack on the details of his statement, the end result was a Joint Commission of Investigation called into existence by the American and Russian governments. The commission was authorized to discover
“whether American servicemen are being held against their will on the territory of the former Soviet Union and, if so, to secure their immediate release and repatriation; to locate and return to the United States the remains of any deceased American servicemen interred in the former Soviet Union, and to ascertain the facts regarding American servicemen who were not repatriated and whose fate remains unresolved.”

At a press conference in the White House Rose Garden on June 16, 1992, President George H. W. Bush pledged, “I want to assure all Americans, and particularly those families of the American POWs and MIAs, that we will spare no effort in working with our Russian colleagues to investigate all information in the Russia archives concerning our servicemen.” President Boris Yeltsin reciprocated in the spirit of the new Russian-American entente:
“I can promise that the joint commission which will be established . . . will report to the American public all the information that will be found in the archives that we are going to open for it . . . the archives in the KGB, in the Central Committee of the Communist Party, regarding the fate of the American POWs and MIAs.”
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In a television interview, Yeltsin gave clues as to what may have happened to the missing Americans: “Some of them were transferred to the former Soviet Union and were kept in labor camps. We don’t have complete data and can only surmise that some of them may still be alive. That is why our investigations are continuing. Some of them may have ended up in psychiatric asylums.”
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The following day, in the White House East Room, Yeltsin was asked by a reporter “if Gorbachev or any of his predecessors, even going back to Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, knew about the possibility that Americans were being held?” His reply was frank:
“Well, that’s just the point. They did know. That’s the very point, that they kept it a secret. The point is that that era, when we kept the truth from each other, has come to an end and we will now tell the truth to each other person to person.”
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DECADES AFTER THE first American prisoners of war had been reported missing, Task Force Russia began its investigation from offices at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. To begin with at least, optimism ran high, although the eight American investigators always maintained that much would depend on the goodwill of their hosts. In the first flush of the anticommunist Yeltsin government, a degree of progress was made. The leader of the Russian side, the historian General Dmitri Volkogonov, unearthed a KGB document revealing the existence of a plan
“to deliver knowledgeable Americans to the USSR for intelligence purposes.”
It was the first official recognition that the imprisonment of American servicemen had been an approved, not merely accidental, policy of the Soviet government.

There were other notable early discoveries. In one find, Volkogonov reported that 119 American prisoners of war were held back by Stalin after the end of the Second World War, because their names had “Russian, Ukrainian or Jewish” origins. But even a Russian general found it difficult to discover the extent of the disappearances. The former Soviet archives were vast, their guardians were recalcitrant, and incriminating documents had often been sequestered or destroyed. As Volkogonov attempted to explain to the American side,
“My own father was shot in 1937 and, to date, I can’t establish where he is buried.”
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